Richard Powers - Gold Bug Variations

Public Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestic

My private life began to accelerate. Before Todd, I never thought of myself as having a private life, let alone one with a brisk plot. Opening the door a crack on that stray, I found my after-hours hinting at a first etude, a study in unmitigated motion. Within minutes of returning from what I still refused to think of as a date, I was back on the phone, arranging to meet Todd again. I rationalized the secrecy, the closed door: I didn't want to confuse Tuck-well with transactions that weren't what they seemed. Not that I knew what they were, or could pick out from my old life the complicating new accompaniment.

I'm not built for change. I work at cultivating habit. Pull out tonight's meal to defrost before leaving; turn right at third stoplight; issue the collegial, automatic greeting. Habit is an index, a compromise with irreversibles, a hedge against auto wreck or disease. The arbitrary day requires a pretense of a priori. But defenses atrophy in quarantine. When I felt that first symptom, I slaughtered routine before it could dissolve on me. Crazy schemes — one day deciding to knock out the living-room wall. The instant the sledgehammer splattered plaster, I knew what I'd done. But a sickening sense of relief too: I'd never again have to worry about the wall caving in.

I was sick in my stomach pit, enough to extinguish a satisfactory existence. Tuckwell and I began to fall apart, wrecked in event. We'd committed no offense except the habit of living together. But all habit ends by presiding over its obsolescence. Even as I closed the door to the bedroom to arrange my next date, I felt I wouldn't be strong enough to end my old life cleanly. If I deliberately killed the old arrangement, everything would be killable. Escape rendered escapable whatever might follow.

Everything about Tuckwell — our apartment, shopping together, our trivial exchanges — grew horribly beautiful. I'd never treated him well. We'd failed to do the things we'd always talked about. I got nostalgic about the most bizarre items: shared wine bottles, accidental tears in the bed linen, utility bills. Even before I started seeing Todd in earnest, I sank into the death-denying compulsion of the collector. Countless times at the library, confronted by a perpetual crisis of shelf space, I've argued with Holdings that thirty-year-old sourcebooks ought not necessarily be pitched just because nobody had ruffled them since publication. Yet even as my heart clamped down to protect a life that had become as habitual as circulation, I knew that the place had already gone bloodless.

Deep in humid summer I felt the shameful excitement of spring cleaning, the sensory alertness brought on by an impending death. Explosion of taste, touch, sight: colors grew subtler, smells more variegated, more exciting because of their morbid source. I profited by another's agony. Three sick weeks, laced with the flavor of discovery, loss restoring the insight that recovery subsequently buries: however much I made love to it, I detested habit with everything in me.

For three weeks, my composure rode an explosive rush. The novelty of Franklin saw me through; I could not have gone it alone. How did I accomplish those leaps, the terrible intervals of those days? All done cross-hands. Independent lines somehow crossing over. Pain and elation in a linkage group. Departure anxiety, the promise of new places intensifying the ache. Disasters stand out: an excursion Tuckwell and I made to Central Park Zoo. We'd planned the trip for one of our rare simultaneous days off. Once there, in front of the cages, we couldn't for the life of us recall why we'd come.

Committed to a formal outing, Keith and I made the rounds, although we knew in the first minute it was an awful mistake. The zoo was grayer, more decrepit than either of us remembered. As everyplace else, it had succumbed to creeping graffiti fungus, the surreal, urgently illegible signatures of the buried. Animals lay neglected in cages, sick, overfed, deflated. The few that moved traced out tight, psychotic circles. A pack of safety-pinned twenty-year-olds (although given our infatuation with extended adolescence, they could have been thirty) bounced marshmallows off the open mouth of a panting sea lion, ridiculing the beast for being too stupid to bite. "Sick, the whole lot," I whispered violently.

"It's your generation made us torturers," Tuckwell joked, steering me on. I couldn't keep from attaching myself to each pen, a mission of pointless distress. Why was the zoo still standing? Why this irrelevant park in the first place? Certainly not for solace. Gruesome ornament, tribute to the sadistic housebreaking of a force that long ago ceased to command fear. The cages proved that plumbing and shag were best, after all. The worst civilized annoyance was superior to the dead end of animals. I waved at the insults tailored to each genus. "What's the point? No beauty we can't humiliate?"

"Serves them right. Lower forms of evolution. They've had just as much geologic time to get evolved as we have. And look at them. Just look at them. Pitiful." But seeing that his patter only irritated me, Keith resorted to logical blundering. "You're mad, woman. So the place is on the decayed side. That's a problem with the tax base, not humanity." Pragmatics failing, he tried compassion. The animals did not know their suffering. And at least here they were kept alive.

We tried to salvage the afternoon by eating out, but fell into a fight over where to go. Keith had made reservations at the Chinese place in the 50s where we'd first had dinner together. He dropped the announcement on me with a now-for-what-you've-all-been-waiting-for flair. "Can't you hear the wontons calling?" I didn't even fake my usual diplomacy. "No? I was pretty sure I could hear a won-ton calling. Something was calling, anyway. High-pitched, squeaky. Maybe it was an egg roll that thought it was a___" Making no headway, he gave up. We began walking crosstown. After a grizzly block, he stopped and caught my arm. "I thought you liked the place."

"I like the place. I'm glad we're going there, OK?" But every concession was a refusal.

"We don't have to go there, you know. So they sue us for the canceled reservation. Take us for everything. I can get a second job—"I laughed, if through my teeth. Feeling the victory, Keith chose his cadence. "Is it those punks? Forget them. Beatniks. Greasers. Whooodlums."

"It's our generation made them torturers."

"Oh. That's it. Sorry. You're not old enough to be their mother. Maybe a very much older spinster sister—"

"Thanks, ass. That's not it."

"The animals, then? Look, you can't do anything about them. Lost cause. The least offensive of our sins. You want anxiety? Zoo animals are the last thing to get morally outraged over, at this late a date." I was still refusing to incriminate myself when we drew up outside the restaurant. Keith was near distraction. "Listen. It's obvious, even to me, that you're trying to tell me something. What's the secret word this time, Jan? I've got to guess, evidently. One assumes it's bigger than the proverbial breadbox, or we wouldn't have killed a decent day over it. Damn it, woman. Look around. We're standing in front of a fine establishment; we can saunter in and make them wait on us hand and foot. The best goddamn mu shu this side of Confucius Plaza. We're more than reasonably well off, given world per capita___" Feeling himself on dangerous ground, he dropped a decibel. "We're both doing exactly what we want in life. You realize the odds against that? Look around, woman. It's your day off. We can do anything you want. Get a room uptown tonight, if you like. Anything. Condemned to freedom, as the Frogs like to say. A perfect day, if you make it. Unlike any other that has ever happened."